Will the real PlayStation 3 launch date please stand up?

Speculation continues to run rampant about the release date for Sony's new …

With the XBox 360 officially launched and the Nintendo's Revolution still under wraps, the anticipation game for Sony's next-generation PlayStation 3 console has reached a fever pitch. With no official word from Sony itself (other than the words "in Spring 2006" on their PlayStation web site), analysts worldwide have been trying to pin down an actual date.

Namco Bandai's president, Takeo Takasu, has come right out and said it: "without any announcements so far, the spring release is impossible." While developer kits have shipped and third-party companies are working on putting together the first round of games to coincide with the release of the platform, the status of the final hardware itself is very much in question. Sony has only shown empty shell mockups at recent trade shows such as CES and the Taipei Game Show.

Financial analysts Merrill Lynch recently posted a report that challenged the possibility of the PS3 even shipping this year in the United States. While some question that report's accuracy (particularly its estimates of component costs for the console itself), there have been other stories leaking out that seem to corroborate its conclusions.

First, a report from a Taiwanese manufacturer Compeq (translated web site) indicates that Sony has placed an order to manufacture the printed circuit boards for the PS3, an order that is not scheduled to be delivered in bulk until the end of June or early July. Obviously, this would make a spring 2006 launch "impossible" and may delay the Japanese launch until fall or even later. As the US release is scheduled for several months after the Japanese one, it may miss the crucial Christmas 2006 shopping season.

Another report, this one coming from Variety, claims that delays in the chips required to control the console's Blu-ray drive are pushing back the release date. That article has been widely criticized for technical errors, however. It seems unlikely that the Blu-ray drive would be the culprit, given that other manufacturers have already demonstrated their Blu-ray drives at the January CES, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment plans to deliver its first batch of Blu-ray movies in May.

Other chips may be causing problems, however, specifically the much-hyped Cell. The custom, PPC-based processor is large (235mm2) and difficult to manufacture. In fact, the specification for the processor calls for one PPE core and eight SPE vector acceleration units, with one SPE disabled. This is thought to be a way of increasing yields on the Cell, since chips that have one broken SPE can still be used in production units. IBM has already had issues with chip production, starting with the iMac G5 debacle, and similar problems were blamed for the shortage of Xbox 360 consoles at launch. Could Sony be delaying the launch of the PS3 to avoid these issues?

All this speculation about release dates, of course, ignores the one thing most gamers will be interested in: the games themselves. Today, few people remember the poor showing of the PlayStation 2 on release, with limited supply of the product, immature development tools, and an extremely weak launch line-up of games. All people remember is that it wound up selling over 100 million units and that it played games like Final Fantasy X and ICO. Can history repeat itself with the PlayStation 3? Clearly, Sony is banking on just such a thing happening.